"We are only two episodes into the new season, and it appears that AMC's "The Walking Dead" may have been resurrected after last years mostly craptacular second season, which was preceded by a pretty craptacular first season. And the reason seems to be the conservative outlook that the show has now embraced. Lets pause for a moment to let the fanatic liberal fanboy virgins fulminate and fret over the notion that their favorite zombie show may have been saved by their characters (and the writers) change  unconscious almost certainly  from a liberal world view to a conservative one.... Lets understand the difference between a liberal world view and a conservative one. Its not necessarily about retail politics, though you got some sense of it with the I dont believe in guns crap early on, as if the world wasnt crawling with cannibal corpses looking to dine on the lesser cast members. And it is not just that the views of the Georgian characters seemed to be the same as the views of the provincial Hollywood screenwriters  country folk are racists and sinister, religious folk are abusive and borderline psycho, and the only good cops are the ones who soft pedal the macho......

I don’t have a problem with the show focusing on the human conflicts and drama that would arise from a zombie apocalypse; I just think that the conflicts that they portrayed were unrealistic, and would not be the types of conflicts one would see in a survival situation like this. That’s what bugs me. We’re not seeing anything close to realistic human behavior.

It still is - the comics are up to issue 100+ now. there’s no liberal bent to the comics at all - it’s simply survive or die. Rick’s character goes to some really, really dark places as the story progresses, and I find myself asking if I’d do the same things to protect my kids if I were in the same situation.

The show diverges somewhat from the books, and has a much softer tone to it. The comics are very dark in some spots - almost disturbing.

54
posted on 10/22/2012 4:44:32 PM PDT
by ItsOurTimeNow
("This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no foolin' around.")

I have seen every episode and I didn’t see any of them as liberal when it started. Being afraid of a gun is not just a liberal view. What I saw was people stuck in “normal”, as in we don’t normally go around shooting people in the head and many loaded guns in the open is a dangerous situation since no one knows what the next guy will do with his gun. Mentally, they tried to stay in the world they knew that had a fair amount of security and was functioning.

It took experience in this new “nothing is there anymore” world for these people to slowly change and accept reality. I don’t see that as going from being liberal to being conservative.

In today’s world, those of us who have thought ahead, mentally play out what would happen if there was no more power for years. We would have to deal with “modern” zombies who have nothing and who are dying every day.

I don’t know how this series will resolve at the end and I don’t know how a world without power would resolve that problem.

I think you might be surprised at how many guns are in the north. States like Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania probably have as many guns as the rest of the country combined.

No doubt. You'd be surprised at how many guns are in California. However, southerners, especially rural southerners, are particularly known for an affinity for firearms, so the idea that guns would be difficult to find there would be especially unrealistic.

Well true enough,,,,but I also read that in the comix that one of Michonne’s pet zombies is an ex-boyfriend. Cutting off his arms, his jaw, then putting him on a leash well that kinda hints that she may have a problem with men.

It's a transitional period. People are still functioning based on how things used to be -- not on how things will be from now on. You'll find that whenever an unprecedented disaster takes place. Many people still take their bearings from what was, not from what is. It's human nature.

A lot of this conflict, though, you can see in other post-apocalyptic dramas (Falling Skies, Jericho, Jeremiah, and now, Revolution). The same moral conflicts come to be expected, so maybe it is time for something different, a different approach. A futuristic world can't be too radically different from our own, though, or viewers will find it hard to relate to.

However, the writers of this show probably had never done anything in their lives to put them into that mode of thinking - typically, Hollywood left-wingers have never been in the military, never been cops, never really spent any time in brutal third-world conditions.

Most script writers come from sheltered upper-middle class families and have not ever been in the life-or-death situations constantly encountered by slum-dwellers. Their whole attitude is that solution to crime is jobs programs, and anything other than jobs programs fails to address the problem.

For me, the defining liberal stupidity moment in the show was the constant fighting over whether people should have guns or not.

I suspect this is a practical issue. Having people wrangling about ideology introduces a note of tension that makes the program a drama rather than a wall-to-wall zombie roller-coaster ride. Guns are like the Hand of God - they settle issues a little too quickly in ways that reduce rather than increase tension. The overuse of guns in a production doesn't add much value - just think of all the crappy war movies that Chuck Norris starred in.

67
posted on 10/22/2012 5:36:09 PM PDT
by Zhang Fei
(Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)

It was her boyfriend (not ex), but it wasn’t like that. He had turned, as had her friend (the other one). Michonne figured out that having them with her as a distracting scent helped her “hide” her human scent from the zombies. She also used them as pack mules. She cut the arms and jaws off so they couldn’t attack her. She kills them immediately after meeting the group so they would allow her to stay.

I enjoy the show, but the comics are a zillion times better. They are also much darker.

“If she cared even a LITTLE for her kid, she would never let him go beyond 3 feet from her sight. It would be INSTINCTIVE. They would all be scared, for one, and people don’t do cavalier stuff when they are afraid. That is why having a bunch of sheltered, spoiled, never-seen-real-danger Hollywood left-wingers writing for a show like this tends to suck: they have no idea what real people would do in a survival situation because they’ve NEVER SEEN IT.”

My wife is from Mexico City (all legal, a citizen and a registered Republican), so she has street sense. She doesn’t let our kids go ANYWHERE without knowing what they’re doing, who they’re with, etc. She does NOT let them out of her sight when in public places. Hell, she only stopped closing the garage door while still in the car a year or so ago, after years of me abusing her about it. IOW, my wife is AWARE of her surroundings and AWARE that danger lurks out there - even pre-zombie. Oh, and she knows how to shoot...I’m afraid that I’ll lose my favorite gun when the zombies come. :>)

I love TWD, though I got pretty disgusted with the touchy-feely, kumbaya BS last season. First season, I could understand the lack of common sense by a bunch of suburban folk, because their world was turned upside down pretty much instantly. By season 2 they should have been far more sensible, and largely weren’t. Now it looks like they’ve wised up for the most part. I don’t understand, though, why they don’t use guns more - most of the people are gone, and you can presume that most homes and (especially) the prison would have plenty that wasn’t expended in the initial appearance of the zombies. Close range, you use your most deadly (no pun intended) weapons - longer range, you can use bows & arrows and such, so as to conserve ammo.

Anyway, looking forward to a much better season...especially if we don’t have a Zed as President. I, for one, am very tired of the undead that we have to deal with now - those wandering around in a daze, expecting everyone else to provide a pound of flesh for them just because they exist, and threatening to riot if they don’t get what they want. Oh, and the present undead are also, thankfully, largely unable/unwilling to use guns, just like the Zeds on TWD.

States like Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania probably have as many guns as the rest of the country combined.

I give people in those state a lot of credit (though a good deal less if they vote for President Zed), but I think that we in Texas alone would give those states a good run for your money. At the time of Waco (20 years ago) it was reported that there were 2 guns in Texas for every adult - and we've been adding to the stockpile since. There are 25 million people here, probably 18-19 million of whom are adults, so do the math...and, at least among those that I know, 2 per adult is considerably on the light side.

All things considered, the more the merrier. More means less chance of the guberment trying to take too many of our liberties. I wish that people had twice as many.

Even in the south you still have unarmed people. According the the FBI 1/3 of all American homes have guns, that still means 2/3 don’t.

Yes Rick had a bag full of guns. And then lost them. And then got them back. And then they got overrun. And then they went to the CDC. From the time Rick joined the group to the end of season 1 was under a week. When they finally did get some time in season 2 at the farm they indeed DID start teaching people how to shoot.

It’s not excusing to understand reality. She’d lived her life in a safe normal world where your kid can go out and play. And now she’s learning, not to mention dealing with all the psychological stress, almost everybody she’s ever known is dead, people are around her keep dieing, the dead are walking, people don’t just wake up one morning able to deal with a new scary reality. There’s a psychological process to deal with trauma, and people don’t function at their best during that.

Why wouldn’t people wander off alone. As you point out, they’re terrified. Any military trainer can tell you fear is the number one emotion for making bad decisions, that’s why so much of training is focused on making you work through fear. Heck Shane even talks about that while training Andrea how to shoot. Yes they SHOULDN’T wander off alone, but they will. People in bad situations do stupid things all the time, because they’re scared and people don’t think right then.

Nothing “suddenly” about it. One of the first things we’re told in the season 3 opener is that they’ve gone all through winter, we’re now 3 to 6 months after the end of season 2 and they’ve spent that time as a roaming band of foragers killing walkers. EVERYBODY has gotten better tactically. Because they’ve gotten the training and experience. It didn’t take months and a lot of whining to start that, they started that training in season 2, a few weeks after Rick joined the group. Your problem is you’re not understanding the timeline math. Season 1 from Rick getting to Atlanta to CDC getting blown up was about a week, season 2 from the freeway to the farm getting overrun was under a month, actually probably closer to 3 weeks. Total time from Rick getting to Atlanta to them starting the training was about 3 weeks, mostly on the run. The progression of what’s happened is very reasonable when you understand the math. They wanted to arm the group but understood most of the group needed training, when they had time for training they trained, now people are trained and they’re armed.

79
posted on 10/23/2012 8:50:04 AM PDT
by discostu
(Not a part of anyone's well oiled machine.)

This is where the writers go wrong. They know, from hearing stories about real people who were in severe survival situations, that tensions are high and people do desperate things, so they are trying to portray such desperate and weird things in the show. Except that they have their characters doing a whole bunch of things that frightened people would never do. That is because these writers have no idea what kind of weird and desperate things frightened people would actually do.

In a world full of flesh-eating zombies, nobody, and I mean NOBODY would wander off alone. You think fear would make them do this? On the contrary, the fear would make them cling together to almost an irrational level, like a drowning man who grabs onto whomever is near. Safety in numbers is one of the most powerfully instinctive behaviors we have. In a life-and-death situation, that instinct would be so powerful that those people would have a hard time leaving the safety of the group even for a second. Wandering off by one's self would be the farthest thing from a natural reaction to this kind of fear that one could think of, but the writes can't recognize that because they've never experienced anything more harsh than mild disagreements over which wine goes best with fish. They know that SOMETHING us supposed to happen when people fear for their lives, but they don't have a clue what, so they just make up silly stuff - and in this case they blew it.

As far as the gun issue goes, if it were me, anyone in my group would know the basics of using a firearm within the first few days. and, if we had the guns, they would all be carrying. Period. Shooting a gun is not rocket science. It does not require a month-long certification class, nor eight weeks of basic training. You can teach the functional basics in a day. These guys were still arguing over the morality of guns well into the second season, which was weeks, if not months, after the initial outbreak. A good example of this in movies was "Aliens" with Sigourney Weaver. She decides to go after the little girl, and the marine shows her how to use the rifle, grenade launcher, and flares within 30 seconds. Would she be as good as a marine? No, but she can still get the rounds to fly out of the weapon in the right direction.

I want this show to be good. It's zombies for Pete's sake, but the writers have been screwing it up because they don't have a clue about real people, or real survival.

I don’t think it’s that cut and dry. We get stories of people doing just plain odd things in bad situations all the time. How many times when there’s a gun rampage do we get tales of people just standing there doing nothing, or folks fleeing and leaving loved ones behind. Logically the instinct is to act together, but instinct isn’t logical. And it just gets more so in a situation that stays scary a long time, the brain burns out, it doesn’t know how to handle fear that last days and weeks. Eventually people will wander off by themselves, just to not be in the group, long periods of time stuck with the same people make you crave isolation.

And with the guns I think you’re forgetting that they also have to live. They need to get food, clean, find supplies. Also they have a limited supply of ammo (along with everything else) and a strong need to be quiet, noise draws zombies, learning to shoot is noisy. And the problem with arming everybody is the when the incompetent ones screw up guess which people they’ll accidentally shoot, yeah probably the competent ones. Yeah you can learn the basics of shooting in a day, shooting in combat is harder. For me the test is simple, I’d ask myself if I’d trust that person to shoot a zombie that’s 5 feet behind me, if the answer is no they don’t get a gun.

Notice in Aliens she’d already shown herself to be competent in a bad situation. She’s the one that kept her cool in the power station and got them out. Hicks knew she had the mental part down, all she needed was the mechanics.

I think it is a good show, you’re just going in with a set of assumptions which is A- unrealistic and B- not what the writers have. And you can see over the course of the story that they thought about all those things, and decided the group would take a more conservative “let’s teach people first” approach. Which for a group that includes 2 cops, an experienced hunter and eventually a war vet makes sense. These are all people that have had the chance to see what people that shouldn’t have guns can do with them. They even had the discussion “on camera” where Rick and Shane agreed they didn’t want a bunch of untrained people randomly putting lead in the air.

82
posted on 10/24/2012 8:55:07 AM PDT
by discostu
(Not a part of anyone's well oiled machine.)

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